‘Vast majority’ of Americans reject political violence, Davis gun violence researcher says

Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is not the first time political violence has happened in America. 

Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated, shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865 while watching a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. 

A look at the history of presidential assassination attempts in America

In 1975, Gerald Ford was on his way to a meeting with California’s governor in Sacramento when Charles Manson disciple Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pushed through a crowd on the street, drew a semi-automatic pistol and pointed it at Ford. The gun wasn’t fired.

More recently, we’ve seen acts like the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop election results from being certified. And in 2022 a man broke into former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and beat her husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer. 

But only a small portion of adults believe these acts of political violence are justified. That’s according to a local researcher who has been studying gun violence in America. 

Dr. Garen Wintemute is an emergency room physician and the director of the California Firearm Violence Research Center based at UC Davis. He spoke with CapRadio’s Chris Nichols about the attempted assassination and what he’s learned from his research. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

You've conducted in-depth studies on political violence. What impact do you think this weekend's shooting will have on political violence this year and into the future?

There are several possibilities. Research suggests that the period of time shortly after such an act is at an increased risk for another, whether it's in retaliation or imitation. Big picture longer term, I am frankly very hopeful. We'll probably get into the details, but what we are seeing in our research and others have seen is that the vast majority of Americans reject political violence and this tragedy over the weekend is, among other things, an opportunity to make that rejection really well known and help us establish a climate at this time in this country of intolerance for violence.

You said there's an opportunity ahead of us, tell me more about what you mean.

I am a physician, as you know. I see violence as a health problem and therefore the decision to participate in violence as a decision about health behavior. We know a great deal about how to influence decisions on health behavior. We know that input from family and from friends and from social networks — be they in person or online — input from respected public leaders, elected officials, members of the clergy, whoever, makes a difference. And if that input in this country at this time is “we do not accept violence,” then good things will result. That's going to require some change because we've had public officials, elected officials — ironically the victim of this weekend's shooting — repeatedly making statements that have the effect of normalizing violence. That rhetoric has to change.

If our country heads down this path and political violence becomes more common, what are the consequences for America?

So there's a wide range, I'm just going to hit some highlights. For me as an emergency medicine physician, one is are we prepared for mass violence? Are we prepared to handle the casualties? Are we prepared to handle casualties where the patients are armed? Where the people who accompanied them are armed? I don't think that's going to happen. But we have to prepare for the possibility. 

Moving further down the line, it's possible that efforts to intimidate voters could shape the outcomes in highly contested states. At the worst case — and no one is thinking this is going to happen but we should prepare for it — it's possible that organized violence will be used to influence voting behavior or the vote count, [and] that we would have to assign a new and bloodier meaning to the term “battleground state.” 

But in the longer run, it's almost impossible to even imagine the scope of things that would flow from us having a non-democratic transition of power from 2024 to 2025. Impact on our assessment of ourselves as a nation, impact on the world's assessment of us as a nation, impact on our place among the leading nations of the world: All of those things are potentially at risk here.

I'm wondering what role can our elected leaders — past and present — play in helping either tamping down or potentially fueling violence?

First off, sadly, political violence has had a place in the United States. We can all of us think of potential assassinations of presidents or would-be presidents or other elected officials and other public figures that we've lived through here. It has no legitimate place in America and it's our job, all of us, to make that legitimate place as small as possible. The role that former presidents, potentially future presidents, other elected officials, other trusted public leaders, whatever their specific background might be can play is they help set the national tone. Elected officials, if this is important on both sides of the aisle, make the statement that political violence is unacceptable things might change. 

The violence prevention research program at UC Davis has conducted large annual surveys on political violence. How have these surveys been conducted, and what's the goal of this research?

The goal of the research is to understand how common support for political violence is, how common willingness to commit it is and again, as a health problem, we want to know what groups are at highest risk for engaging in this behavior. Having that kind of basic information can help us prevent political violence. So with that in mind, beginning in 2022, we started what's called a longitudinal survey. We are surveying the same people over and over, year after year. It's a big survey. There were more than 12,000 people in it at the beginning. It's what's called a national league representative sample. So our survey results can be taken to accurately reflect the sense of the nation's adults at the time the survey was done.

In 2022, we found that a third of Americans thought political violence was justified, at least sometimes. Importantly, support fell in 2023. 2023 wasn't an election year, but it fell to about 25%. In 2024, we just got the data back, but we're not seeing a rebound. We're not seeing — nationwide — more support for political violence in this election year. So people need to understand as they calibrate, “What should I think about political violence? Other people aren't supporting it. So why should I?”

What should local, state or national law enforcement agencies be doing?

The fundamental realization, as with mass shootings, is to understand there's no such thing as an “it-can't-happen-here” place. So agencies across the country have been thinking and preparing for the possibility that this could be the flavor that mass violence takes in their community on any given day. Very importantly, agencies at all levels of government are working hard to prevent this from happening to the extent they can, given the tools available. Using tools to identify people who are at high risk so that they can make contact with those people, if need be. Try to assess the risk. Try and divert somebody who might be thinking about doing violence from taking a vague plan into something specific and then committing it.